Find out how one navy veteran is helping other women who experienced rape in the military

A Different Kind of Battle

A Different Kind of Battle

I live in the most peaceful place you can imagine, a farm in Milbridge, ME. But even here I have terrible nightmares and insomnia. I flip through TV channels and play Sudoku while my husband, Butch, and our daughter, Samantha, sleep. When I do sleep, Butch wakes me up in the morning by wiggling my toe—he learned the hard way that if he touches me anywhere else I jump up and start defending myself. I've had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for more than 20 years.

Butch is my rock—a gentle, easygoing man—and Samantha, 11, is worth life itself. She makes me so proud. Part of why I'm sharing my story is because I want her to be proud of me, too, to know I fought to make this country a place where what happened to me isn't tolerated.

New Recruit

New Recruit

My father served in the Army, my stepfather was a Marine, and I joined the Navy at 17 in 1986. I envisioned serving my country and becoming a professional woman. I had it all planned—I'd start as an aerographer's mate (like a Navy weatherperson), then become an officer. I married a fellow sailor right after boot camp and was posted in the Azores, a group of islands about 1,000 miles from Europe in the Atlantic.

It was there, outside a club on base, that I was raped by my supervisor, a petty officer. To this day, the smell of his cologne, Drakkar Noir, brings on flashbacks. I get a tinny, acrid taste in my mouth, like the metal of the knife he held on me, and I can't breathe.

I was terrified, but I knew I had to tell someone. Service members are supposed to report sexual assaults up the chain of command to their superiors, which would have meant my attacker's friends. I couldn't do it. The next day, I reported the attack to my squadron chaplain instead. He said that if I wanted to have a career in the Navy, I needed to get over it. Somehow, my attacker caught wind of the conversation, and a few days later he raped me again. "You just couldn't keep your mouth shut," he growled.

In the weeks that followed, I tried to simply do my job. I said, "Yes, sir" and obeyed orders from my rapist. It was crushing, humiliating. I had no one I could trust—the base was like a small town and communications were monitored, so I couldn't even call or write home about it. I was scared he'd kill me.

Then, about a month later, I was diagnosed with chlamydia. It was just too much. I needed the fear and pain to stop, so I tried to kill myself. When they found me passed out in my barracks, I was shipped back to the States and put in a locked ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I told the doctors there that I'd been raped, but they didn't believe me. They diagnosed me with borderline personality disorder, saying I must have experienced a "break from reality" and imagined the attack. Years later, I learned that this diagnosis—followed by a psychiatric discharge—was the fate of many victims of military sexual trauma (MST), a way to get rid of us without investigation or liability. At the time, I was furious. I insisted again and again, no, I wasn't crazy—I had never had any kind of psychiatric problems—I'd been raped! But no one listened and I was discharged.